It is in the crisp performance, the impeccable timing and the energy between Kabwe and Elderkin that render this work unforgettable. If you have loved and lost, if you have watched an illness become something that overflows the margins of being, , this play will speak to you. And haunt you.
Their limbs work like entities with autonomous opinions, and their muscles seem filled with mercury, yet the flow of dance is tight, from the core, and performed in satisfying unison. It’s dance that gives everything from Amapiano to House and beyond, gestural apostrophe and wit in all the right places.
‘The Tramp’ is punted as a pocket musical; it contains an immense ambit which peers into the complex life of a man who skirted controversy wherever he went. It holds you with beautiful performances and a set that strips the Chaplin name of cliche and gives analogue the upper hand.
‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
In Lucas Hnath’s ‘A Doll’s House Part 2’, there is empathy and fierceness in the give and take between social values. Zane Meas opposite Bianca Amato is splinteringly fine in his masculine vulnerability and sense of impotence with a softened edge of reconciliation for the damage that mansplaining can bring.
‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ has a strong moral back bone without being clean of fart and snot jokes that are endemic to being a tween, and performed, by a cast which is itself, adolescent, is nothing short of a magical success on the part of its director, Vicky Friedman.
On a level, Micaela Jade Tucker’s one-woman play is an advocacy piece about taking care of a woman’s body, with all its tendencies to pick up judgement, viruses and other things. It’s about broken condoms, reeling ideas in and taking responsibility for who you think you are in the world.
In the hands of one of South African theatre’s dream teams, this is a gem of a work. Job Kubatsi and Lebohang Motaung, in minor roles, give life to the bitter jokes that lubricated black society during the darkest days of apartheid, reminiscent of the bleak humour in Dostoevsky’s novels.
HOW DO YOU give fresh life to a biography that has been told millions of times before? If you are Amanda Bothma, Kerry Hiles and Luke Holder, and the biography in question is that of the great Judy Garland, you immerse yourself into the very fabric of that […]
WHEN YOU HEAR complete strangers discussing their culinary habits on their way out of a theatre, you know that something has sunk into their sensibilities, and the play has reached them. You have this morning to re-arrange your plans: there is just one performance left of the delightful […]
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